Baking Baking Baking

[unicornduke]

I'm on vacation from work from this past weekend until Dec 2nd, no work, no travel since I'm not going to PA. My parents are actually driving down to my brother's place since he was going to be spending thanksgiving there with his girlfriend. Somehow my parents invited themselves down? I'm not sure. But either way, too much driving and as much as I love my parents, I've seen them all summer. Plus thanksgiving and christmas are very close and I get more time off then and I'll spend a while visiting over that break.

So I'm on day four of vacation and I've been baking a ton. It's awesome. I'm going to a coworkers gathering on thursday and I'm taking a variety of cookies. So right now I have made cornmeal shortbread cookies, hazelnut cookies that need to have chocolate added. I'm going to make bacon snickerdoodles tomorrow since the bacon needs to thaw. I also want to make some kind of apple cookie since I have a million apples. Maybe an apple bar? 







I'm currently roasting three varieties of hulless pumpkin seeds, which are amazing and delicious. I want to do some taste tests with various people but I don't know if they'll make it there if I eat them all. 



I also made two blueberry cardamom pies over the weekend, one for friends and one for Jade. The first one I went heavy on the cardamom and it was very cardamom tasting and I backed off it for Jade since she's more into the blueberries. This is the gluten free pie crust recipe I used. It worked decently, with a lot of cracking but I basically just laid the top over itself and put parchment paper down to catch all the extra juice from the blueberries. Kinda messy but works good. Crust ended up very thin as well.



I also made granola last night.

I'm only going to bake tomorrow night since Jade is doing some nightmare shifts over thanksgiving. Like, she's staying up all night tonight after her 12 hour shift to get her sleep schedule set for 3am thursday morning to 10am ish. then back to work 10pm that night to 6am. I'm trying to come up with ways to keep myself out of the apartment because I know I won't be able to resist doing stuff and making a ton of noise. So tomorrow some time I'm going to go ice skating and see charlie's angels. I may also visit a local yarn shop if they have knitting/spinning group tomorrow.

Comments

[graydon]

Carmilla-pumpkins! I am filled with glee.

It's difficult to read good for something highly spiced where something else takes the lead on taste as other than condemned! but I suppose it will always thicken soup a bit. :)

That's there's multiple varieties of oilseed pumpkins strikes me as good news. Thank you!

[unicornduke]

I mean, my main use for pumpkin/squash is in a squash pie that is lightly spiced and other than the squash is eggs and cream. No crust. So like, the taste of the squash is very important! But in a soup or with something else it might be okay. It's a very pale yellow flesh squash and fairly bland as far as these things go. Not sweet either. So not really suitable for a pie, but it would also do well in a bread or something. Just not my thing :)

I think the most common variety is Styrian pumpkin, which I would imagine some companies in Canada would carry, probably smaller companies. But if you order from the US, Kakai, Naked Bear, HSC151, Pie-Pita are also fairly easy to get. Of course, then you'd need to grow them since they aren't super widely grown here.

[graydon]

I shall keep this in mind should I ever acquire some dirt!

And I totally get the "I want to eat the flesh" thing about squash; the local market has some very erratic squash, sometimes lovely, sometimes not so much. It's frustrating. (I am big into splitting, scooping, and stuffing when it comes to squash.)